How to Throw a DIY Sugar Scrub Party + Recipe

What’s better than crafting? Crafting with family and friends of course! A few weeks ago, I invited a couple girlfriends to eat, drink, chat and make sugar scrub and nail polish. Both projects are great for parties because they are fun, easy, and attendees can take home their creations the same day.

You can have two DIY stations like I did (nail polish + sugar scrub), or focus on one project. In this post, I’ll show you how to setup a DIY sugar scrub station for your next party…look out for a “How to Throw a DIY Nail Polish Party,” post in a few weeks! =)

During this party, we created a Winter Gardenia Sugar Scrub. The scrub can be created directly in the 4 oz. plastic bail jar, so cleanup is easy. If you have a few scales, you can create the recipe using weight. If not, the volume amounts are listed in the recipe below as well. If measuring in volume, simply fill the jar to the top with sugar and stir. While this recipe features a specific fragrance oil and jojoba bead, you can use any fragrance or color of jojoba bead you’d like!

Created with moisturizing meadowfoam oil and potassium cocoate, this sugar scrub leaves hands feeling soft and silky. The Jasmine Jojoba Beads add non-scratchy, gentle exfoliation and a pop of elegant color. Don’t forget to add preservative! While this recipe does not contain water, this scrub may be stored in the shower and come in contact with water. To be on the safe side, Optiphen is added to the scrub to keep the scrub mold and bacteria free.

ONE: Place meadowfoam oil and potassium cocoate in the jar and stir until well blended.TWO: Add 2 mL optiphen and 2 mL fragrance oil. Stir well to thoroughly combine.THREE: Add 2 tsp. of jojoba beads and the sugar into your jar. Carefully mix all ingredients together. Label your scrub and enjoy!

If you’d like to purchase enough ingredients to host a party, the kit below includes enough to create ten scrubs. This kit also includes labels, instruction cards and cards to label the DIY station. Simply download and print! The only ingredient you need to provide is granulated sugar.

Click here to add everything you need for this project to your Bramble Berry shopping cart!

When setting up your scrub making area, keep in mind some containers and tools will be necessary. For the jojoba beads, small sample cups allowed the jojoba beads to be easily passed around the station. One large bowl of sugar with several measuring cups allowed multiple people access to the sugar at one time. One pound of sugar was plenty!

Plenty of spoons to stir the scrub together (at least one for each guest)

Scissors and pens to cut out scrub labels and write the name

If you are worried about your counters, you may want to lay a protective surface on top. The great thing about this recipe is there are no colorants that could possibly stain clothing or counters. The only ingredient to be careful with is the fragrance oil, as fragrance oils can cause irritation if directly applied to the skin.

To help my party-goers feel confident in creating the scrub, I first demonstrated how to make the scrub. Then, I passed out the recipe cards so each person had the measurements and directions to easily reference. It was so fun to see the non-DIYers get excited about their homemade scrub!

Adding the jojoba beads into the liquid ingredients first helps the jojoba beads distribute throughout the scrub easily. Remember to have plenty of spoons on hand to ensure all the party-goers can thoroughly mix their scrubs.

Of course in addition to DIY, there was plenty of food and beverages to enjoy. See that cheese plate in the corner? So delicious! If serving food, I recommend having it in a separate area from the scrub ingredients to avoid any food/beauty ingredient cross contamination =)

Once the scrub is thoroughly mixed and complete, it’s time to add a label. The sugar scrub labels were specifically designed to allow the party attendees to name their own scrub. You can write the name of the fragrance oil, or get creative and come up with a unique personalized name!

Have you ever thrown a DIY crafting party? I would love to hear what you made, and if you have any tips on making the party run smoothly!

I think I’m doing it wrong…
I mixed everything as it said..I think.. And ended up with something the consistency of warm marshmallow. While this isn’t all bad, it wasn’t quite what I was looking for. It’s so thick that there are air pockets everywhere in the jar. Oops..
I mixed the meadow and cocoate first and it turned white, then the optiphen and fragrance next..this is where things got thick. I made 3 small batches each with a different fragrance. In one batch I tried mixing the meadow and cocoate, then adding the optiphen and mixing that without the fragrance. It seems to be the optiphen that is making the mixture go from runny to taffy. Any advice would be appreciated! Thank you!

I think I figured it out… I wasn’t adding anything by weight and using fl.oz. instead.. (Even for the sugar….) Weighing them it came out less tacky and much smoother. By weight I needed a few ml extra of the cocoate and meadow.
It’s still not as runny as I’d like, but its much better than the previous marshmallow dough that I’d concocted.

That’s great! We find weight is a bit more accurate for this recipe. If you want the scrub a bit more runny, you can add some more oil. That will help make it more liquidy. I would start off with about .5 ounces. Then, you can add more from there until you get a consistency you like. 🙂

The shelf life of this product is a year or so. A shelf life of a product depends on the shelf lives of the butters and oils added to it. For instance, if your product has hazelnut oil, the shelf life will be shorter because hazelnut has a shelf life of three months.

Hi,
I don’t find safer preservatives in my place. If I order from brambleberry, the shipping cost is very expensive for me. Can I use witch Hazel as a preservative in my products? Please help regarding this. I am very much frustrated in searching for optiphen and phenonip.
Thanks in advance.

If you are in the UK or Australia, there are stores there that sell Bramble Berry products. That may be an option for you! Also, some of our international customers go together on orders to help split shipping costs. 🙂

I would like to use Vit E for preserving and Citric Acid and/or Ascorbic Acid to help with extending the oils shelf life, as well as the benefits of Ascorbic Acid, in my sugar scrubs. Can you give a recommendation of how much of each I should use? I’m very new at this and want to make a sugar scrub like the one I’m currently buying, which is rather expensive. It contains vit. E and citric acid but none of the other preservatives I seen mentioned in the blogs. Thank you for your time and help.

While vitamin E doesn’t protect the scrub against mold and bacteria, it does extend the shelf life of the oils in the scrub! You can definitely add it to this recipe. We recommend it around 1% of the total weight in the recipe. 🙂

As for the citric acid, we haven’t done a lot of testing with that in scrubs so I’m not exactly sure how it will work. I think that will be just fine! I would recommend starting out with a teaspoon or so and testing it on your skin. If you want more, you can add from there. 🙂

I wanted to make this to give as Christmas gifts. I only needed 8, so I multiplied each of the ingredients by 8 and made it as one big batch. I must have done something wrong, because my scrub came out very dry, nothing like the photo. I could easily make sandcastles with this scrub, they would easily hold their shape! Did I scale up incorrectly? I went with: 4oz meadowfoam oil, 2.4oz potassium cocoate, 8ml Optiphen ND, 8ml Winter Gardenia FO, and 1oz of the jojoba beads (I mistakenly ordered 1 packet instead of 2). I weighed out all of the ingredients except for the Optiphen and FO. Any suggestions for rescuing this batch? Thanks!

The great thing is you can totally save this scrub by adding some more meadowfoam and potassium cocoate. I would recommend adding them about .5 oz at a time until you get a nice liquidy consistency. Keep track of how much you add, because you’ll need to increase your preservative as well. You want the Optiphen to be .5-1.5% of your total recipe.

You can also add a couple more mL of fragrance oil if you want that scent a little stronger. Just make sure to weigh out your scrub and plug it into the Fragrance Calculator. That way you can find out the right amount of scent to add. 🙂

I recently made this using Sleigh Ride FO and I really love the results! I plan to make more for Christmas gifts and would like to know if I can substitute Optiphen ND for the Optiphen? I bought the Optiphen ND a few months ago and used it to make the Bridal Gift Sugar Scrub and I would like to be able to use it in other recipes as well! Thank you all at Brambleberry for all of the neat recipes and ideas!

LOVE this! I will be doing this soon! Perfect timing with these DIY tutorials as I’ve been wanting to expand my business to include DIY hostess parties where I charge for my time to teach and materials and someone else hosts the party.

Potassium cocoate is a bubbly product similar to liquid soap. Coconut oil, on the other hand, is a cleansing oil that’s solid at room temperature. Adding coconut oil instead would change the consistency of the scrub and make it harder.

If you prefer not to use potassium cocoate, we have some great scrub recipes you may like. I’ll include them below. 🙂

Hi, I was wondering can u make a tutorial on bath/shower oil. My mom brought some brought some shower oil from Avon. You know how that goes. Only sell a product monthly. The product contained oils, but it felt like water. Idk. It wasn’t too oily. I came in a spray bottle. So please…Can u make a tutorial. Thank u!
P.S. it’s used after a shower or bath.

Potassium cocoate is created with coconut oil, potassium hydroxide lye and glycerin. While the lye is used to make it, it is not present in the final product. I’ll include a post that explains more about that. 🙂

It contains glycerin as a natural moisturizer, and you can use it at 35% or less in your recipe.

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